Great post Rand. I'm putting this to use in a live, open SEO experiment for a site I am building from scratch. Almost all of these ideas are incorporated. Follow along, give advice, opinions and prognostications of whether it will work or FAIL. Comment on the blog or Facebook fan page for Datasheetreference. I hope its useful to anyone trying to build organic rank.

Hire Carefully, Fire Quickly. For any company, but startups in particular, it's critical to think through the kind of skills needed to fill a position - including making sure the hire has the right stuff for the unique dynamics of a startup. I've always been amazed to watch little companies hire buddies or box-checkers that didn't have the skills/attitudes to do what was needed. Virtually every person is critical to success; they need to buy into the idea of the company and be willing to adapt constantly. Equally painful is realizing that you hired a less-than-stellar person and not being willing to let them go. Sometimes companies go on paying precious cash to people that clearly aren't working out. It's bad for cash, bad for morale and bad for the company. Hiring well and making hard decisions comes with the territory.

I think you are right on Rand. Any web-based startups should be thinking how they can get as much mileage from thier precious capital as possible. SEO is a great arrow in the quiver for startup marketers. Not understanding it is simply no excuse - startup people dont understand most of what they are getting themselves into in the first place. Successful ones learn fast and keep thier eyes open.

The biggest problem in startups is that they often have poor marketing overall. Frankly there are a lot of marketing people that are really just marcomm people - they don't have good skills in market strategy and product marketing.

The only problem in your post is that you picked one of my competitors to highlight. I dont mind you giving them pointers but did you have to give them freebie link love too? My company, SupplyFrame, is fully engaged in SEO and work for every link we can get!

SupplyFrame's B2B site has some other kinds of advertising you might find interesting (disclosure: I work there). We're an electronic component search engine for engineers. Many components are standard but made by many companies, or designed to go in sets, or are upgrades of one another. Our ads work by presenting subtle 'value added' content suggesting the researcher investigate other options. We also have some traditional CPM stuff, don't let that distract you.

Here is a good example: http://www.supplyframe.com/partsearchservlet/partdetail/TIS/LM393P. In this case the 'promoted part' from National is a suggested alternative and an ad.